Pizza Party

Last night, the girls had a pizza party/play-date with their friends Nate and Anja:

While the kids were all excited to have pizza, they were overwhelmingly MORE excited about playing together, particularly because at our last dinner play-date with Nate and Anja, Julia came up with a game of "Police" that the kids were eager to resume.  Because Julia was dissatisfied with Nate's inability to remember every kid's pretend name in the game, she came up with the brilliant idea that everyone should wear a name tag to make things easier:

As you can see, Nate's police officer alias was "David," and Julia's was, once again, "Meggin."  Although Madeleine is not pictured above, she too had her own name tag, that said - I know you're all going to fall out of your seats in shock - SIMBA.  Anja was not able to consistently stick with one name for herself, so she alone remained un-nametagged.

What started out as a simple game of "police" soon evolved into an even MORE exciting game.  And it's hard to imagine what can be more exciting than this:

JULIA: (holding a mini-soccer ball and play Elmo remote) Wait!  David!  We need our -
NATE: (gesturing towards the soccer ball) Bomb?
JULIA: No!  Our -
NATE: (gesturing towards the play remote) Super electricity flasher?
JULIA: YES!
NATE AND JULIA: Come on!  (taking off down the stairs)

However, they *did* indeed manage to top the excitement of the super electricity flasher, and came up with a game that Julia refers to as "Miss." 

In Julia's own words, here is what the game is all about: "So, like, someone named Miss always calls on the phone, and thinks emergencies are, like, FROGS hopping on LILY PADS and stuff like that, and she had all these friends, like Miss POOPY, Miss Stargazer, Miss Snake, and Miss Frog.  They called about weird stuff also.  Like: 'A'hm a FROWG!'  And she had some weird accent, and her MOM called, and stuff, and we got SO annoyed that we had to listen to songs about Miss to figure out more about her.  I was a police woman and Nate was a police man, and...Madeleine was a police MAN, I guess, because her name was SIMBA." 

Sounds AMAZING. 

In fact, Julia and Nate were SO into this game that it was painful for them to part when it was time for bed.  Julia has been reminiscing about it all day today, as well, wistfully reflecting to me, "I hope Nate and Anja can come over again soon, because I can't wait to play 'Miss'..."

Just in case the above description doesn't make it COMPLETELY evident how absolutely thrilling "Miss" is, Julia is at your service to very thoroughly explain the fun that is to be had in this game:  "It was so, like, fun that we could, like, well, like, I don't really KNOW...it was just really fun."

Clear now?  Yeah, I thought so.